Resistance Art to See in New York City

Late last year, after Donald Trump was elected President, Badlands
Unlimited—the publishing house founded by the artist Paul Chan, which
defies all labels except subversive and kickass—printed a poster with
six incantatory stanzas of black-and-white text. It begins:

The several dozen artists whose work is featured in this superlative
survey did not conform to one style, but they did share urgent concerns,
often addressing issues of bias and exclusion in their art—and in their
art-world organizing. The Just Above Midtown Gallery (JAM), a crucial
New York institution of the black avant-garde, was instrumental to the
careers of a number of them, including Lorraine O’Grady, whose sardonic
pageant gown made of countless white gloves—the artist wore it in
guerrilla performances at gallery openings—is a wonder. There is much
powerful photography on view, from Ming Smith’s spontaneous portraits of
Harlemites in the seventies to Lorna Simpson and Carrie Mae Weems’s
poignant pairings of image and text, from the eighties. But the
ephemera—the fascinating documentation and spirited newsletters—provide
the exhibition’s glue, presenting women not as anomalous achievers but
as part of a formidable movement. (Brooklyn Museum, 200 Eastern Parkway, Brooklyn. 718-638-5000. Through Sept. 17.)

Four hard-hitting video works—by David Hammons, Arthur Jafa, Steve
McQueen, and Mika Rottenberg—play in four separate rooms. The artists’
formal approaches diverge, but they share a profound awareness of bodies
and of the camera’s power to disrupt stereotypes about race, class, and
gender. Rottenberg’s “NoNoseKnows” deploys the artist’s trademark
politically razor-sharp absurdism, intercutting footage of Chinese women
laboring to harvest pearls with surreal scenes shot in New York.
McQueen’s “Five Easy Pieces” is a seductive meditation on voyeurism,
with its slow-motion footage of unsuspecting subjects, from a tightrope
walker to a man urinating. Hammons’s only video work, “Phat Free,” is a
powerfully simple vignette in which a disorientingly noisy darkness
lifts to reveal a man kicking a metal bucket down the street, evoking
the danger of walking while black in America. Racist violence is more
than a spectre in Jafa’s timely marvel of rhythmic editing, “Love Is the
Message, the Message Is Death,” in which archival civil-rights-era
images, sports and entertainment clips, and dash-cam and cell-phone
footage shift seamlessly—and heartbreakingly—between moments of triumph
and terror. (The Met Breuer, 945 Madison Ave. 212-731-1675. Through Sept. 3.)

In all its sumptuous, ragtag, iconoclastic, and utopian forms, hippie
clothing reflected the seismic cultural shifts of Vietnam War-era
America, eschewing the mass-produced in favor of the personalized and
the handmade. This captivating exhibition, installed in moodily lit
galleries against purple-and-gold wallpaper, goes beyond the expected
caftans and macramé to detail the nuances and extremes of
countercultural aesthetics. A section devoted to stage costumes includes
a medieval-inspired muumuu, its pastel-ombré velvet adorned with a
starburst appliqué; Mama Cass Elliot, of the Mamas & the Papas, wore it
in 1967. Nearby, looping film footage includes performance documentation
of the Cockettes, an anarchic theatre group whose psychedelic,
thrift-store drag sensibility helped shape a nascent queer aesthetic.
From the Army-surplus garments appropriated and painstakingly
embroidered by flower children to the dashikis and African fabrics
embraced by the black-pride movement to the ascetic styles of communes
and cults, the exhibition emphasizes how vernacular fashion signalled
antiestablishment values and group identity. That said, high fashion
isn’t neglected. One highlight is the visionary designer Kaisik Wong’s
glittering, futuristic “wearable art,” which resembles armor and cocoons
from another planet—or the next Aquarian age. (Museum of Arts and Design, 2 Columbus Circle. 212-299-7740. Through Aug. 20.)

From Nan Goldin’s intimate 1994 portraits of patients in hospice care to
ephemera from grassroots organizations, this thoughtful exhibition
elucidates the ways in which the AIDS plague transformed community
activism. Strangers became caregivers, friends became family, and
domestic spaces became sites of support and resistance. The Buddy
Program, initiated by Gay Men’s Health Crisis, in 1982, to assist AIDS patients at home, is poignantly commemorated with documentation that includes a handwritten sign-up sheet and a photograph of God’s Love We
Deliver volunteers ladling soup into takeout containers. The AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power—better known as ACT UP—is represented by Bill Bytsura’s charming portraits of its diverse membership. The show also
includes a broadsheet, from 1989, condemning the current U.S. President
for receiving a lavish tax abatement for Trump Tower while the sick were
dying on city streets. In one photograph, a prescient drag Dorothy is
seen holding a protest sign that reads “Surrender Donald.” (Museum of the City of New York, Fifth Ave. at 103rd St. 212-534-1672. Through Oct. 22.)

Nari Ward

In his new show, titled “Till, Lit,”
the Jamaican-born, Harlem-based artist presents formally striking and
politically charged sculptures made from surprising materials. The
“till” of the title evokes both field labor and the reserves of a cash
register. Compartments from the latter figure in a number of works here,
as do delicate paper rectangles that are made from the excised edges of
dollar bills. These shapes overlap in abstract compositions, such as the
austere “Royal Alpha” and the shimmering “Providence Spirits (Silver),”
which also incorporates cowrie shells (once valued as money). The legacy
of slavery and its barbaric transactions suffuses the works on view. The
powerful installation “Lit” uses buzzing floodlights and a
concrete-submerged ladder to conflate antebellum slave patrolling with
present-day police surveillance. The mixed-media work “Hanging Study”
proposes a form of redress—it spells out the word “reparations.” (Lehmann Maupin, 536 W. 22nd St. 212-255-2923. Through Aug. 25. )

“Body, Self, Society: Chinese Performance Photography of the 1990s”

In the repressive period following China’s 1989 Tiananmen Square
protests and massacre, assertions of individuality were dissident by
definition, and most of the black-and-white photographs in this compact
seven-artist exhibition leverage that fact with a fraught but
straightforward focus on the artists’ own bodies. Zhang Huan prods and
pinches his face, Ma Liuming walks naked on the Great Wall, and Ai
Weiwei interacts violently with his nation’s history, in the triptych
“Dropping a Han Dynasty Urn.” Most interesting are the artists who
deëmphasize their own position in favor of the complex futility of the
larger situation, as Song Dong does in “Printing on Water (Performance
in the Lhasa River, Tibet),” a grid of thirty-six pictures, documenting
an hour that the artist spent repeatedly trying to stamp the word
“water” into the river using a large wooden seal. (Walther Collection,
526 W. 26th St. 212-352-0683. Through Aug. 17.)

The New Yorker offers a signature blend of news, culture, and the arts. It has been published since February 21, 1925.